This 3,750-Year-Old Babylonian Tablet Is The World’s Oldest Recorded Customer Complaint

In the British Museum in London, there is an ancient clay tablet on exhibit. The artifact dates back to Mesopotamia, specifically to a city-state known as Ur. Etched onto its face, the tablet has a message – and it expresses its sculptor’s profound displeasure.

At the start of the 1900s, a British man called Sir Leonard Woolley first investigated the site of Ur. As a result of his meticulous means of research, Woolley is thought of as a pivotal figure within contemporary archaeology. He made multiple discoveries at Ur, and helped to construct a clearer image of what the city was once like.

Ur was an important place within the Sumer civilization, which itself was among the first ever mass societies in history. Sumer sat in the south of Mesopotamia, in the southern part of what we today call Iraq. Experts believe that settlements first sprung up in Sumer between 5500 B.C. and 4000 B.C.